Keith Lee Morris maps unsettling corridors in 'Travelers Rest'

You miss so much, driving on the interstates. "You just drive and drive and pass right by interesting places like this one," as Julia Addison, a character from Keith Lee Morris' hypnotically dread-inducing, neo-Gothic novel "Travelers Rest," puts it. "You'd never even know they were here."

Julia is referring to Good Night, Idaho, an old mining town, where she and her family — her husband, a university professor named Tonio; their 10-year-old son, Dewey; and Tonio's ne'er-do-well brother, Robbie, just out of his latest stint in drug rehab — find themselves in the middle of a snowstorm. The Addisons take refuge at the formerly opulent, now rundown 19th-century hotel that gives the novel its title. Before long, the family members are isolated and searching for one another in the labyrinthine, oddly shifting rooms and corridors of the hotel, whose dark history is still unfolding and engulfing the present — and giving the word "souvenir" a sinister new meaning.

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Maybe driving on those interstates isn't such a bad idea, after all. In any case, Printers Row caught up with Morris — whose previous novels include "The Greyhound God" (2003) and "The Dart League King" (2008) — for a phone interview from his home in Clemson, S.C., where he is a professor of creative writing at Clemson University. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: You're from Idaho, I think?

A: I was born in Mississippi, but grew up in Idaho, yes, from the time I was 6.

A: Uh-huh. It's a fictionalized version of a town that's close to one of the places I grew up in Idaho. In the book, the characters are driving east on the interstate and get off at Exit 70. But there is no Exit 70. The last exit before you hit the Montana border is Exit 69. But Good Night is loosely based on Wallace, an old mining town in that area.

Q: There's something ghostly, almost by definition, about old mining towns.

A: Oh yeah. When I was growing up in that area — my father was a high school football coach in Kellogg, Idaho, which is right next to Wallace — the Sunshine Mine, a big mine, had what is still to this day (one of) the United States' worst mining disasters. (The underground fire and fumes killed 91 men.) I was 8 or 9 years old at the time, and I think just being in that environment — I had friends whose parents were in the mine — created that feeling, in my imagination, that there was something spooky about the place.

Q: What was the initial impulse for the book, which is very different from your earlier novels?

A: It's pretty tough to trace. I guess most books have a strange evolutionary pattern, but this one is stranger than most. For a long time I've written two different kinds of fiction. One is what I guess you would call straight realism, or "dirty" realism some people would say. Small-town Idaho stuff. Blue-collar protagonists, down on their luck, the underdog, etc. Both of my previous novels were in that vein. But at the same time, for the past 20 years I've been writing what I call "dream fiction" — stories that are based on dreams or have a dreamlike quality. I've always done that with short stories, though, never with something as long as a novel. So this was my first attempt to write in that mode in a novel.

Q: How does that work?

A: The way I do it is I start off with a piece of a dream and let a narrative start to unfold without knowing exactly where it's going. This novel was originally going to take place at the beach. We go to St. Simons Island in Georgia on vacation every year, and the book started with a dream I had about this beach house where we stay. I walked outside, and there was a window on the outside of the house that shouldn't have been there, and there were two people in the window, talking to one another. So that was the initial impulse. But after I got about 18 pages into it, all I had was this scene with a family pulling up at this house, and it didn't go anywhere from there. So later, I was actually out in Wallace, Idaho, because I have a friend there who opened up a microbrewery. And an old buddy of ours took us into an old abandoned hotel that his mother had bought, and we started rambling around this place at night after we'd visited the microbrewery and sampled the merchandise. One of my friends actually managed to get himself locked into one of the rooms. And that's when the story started taking shape in my mind as being set in this old hotel. And it went from there.

Q: We don't want to give too much away about the plot, but we can safely say that in this hotel, the natural laws of time, space, etc., don't seem to apply in the expected ways.

A: I don't think of it as a ghost story or a horror novel, the way some people do — I think of it as more of a dream narrative, an elaborate dream that all of these characters are caught up in. But those other ways make perfect sense. When I was writing the book, and getting lost in those nooks and crannies in the hotel, the same way Robbie gets lost, I had an acronym that I used to keep reminding myself not to get too far off track: MADFIST — Memory, Apprehension, Dreams, Family, Identity, Solitude and Time. And if what I was writing didn't have anything to do with one of those, then I knew I was getting way off track.

Q: In a way, you could say that this book is a combination of your two fictional modes. Certainly it's psychologically realistic.

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A: Sure. The characters are very similar to other characters I've written, and they're still coming from my experience, the kind of people I grew up with.

Q: There are family dynamics that preexist their arrival at the hotel—for example, the hints of a potential love triangle involving Julia, Tonio and Robbie — that make the hotel a projection of their own emotional states.

A: Right. Certainly I had a strategy of getting them into the hotel and then have them all isolated from each other, so that each one is off in their own separate world, their own separate experience. But that's what families are, right? We're all sort of in the same space and time, occupying the same moment, but we're all off in our own little separate worlds. We try as hard as we can to create this unit where everybody sticks together and everybody's responsible for everybody else, but really we're all alone here.

Q: You use several quotations from Proust to introduce the novel and its various sections. He's associated with certain ideas about memory and time that you take up in the book — I think you actually use the phrase "lost time" at one point — and that haunts the whole enterprise, in a way.

A: I was reading "Remembrance of Things Past" — the original Moncrieff translation — when I was writing "Travelers Rest." It's probably one of the few books that can take you longer to read it than it does to write your own novel. (Laughs.)

Q: It took me a year to read it.

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A: That's pretty good; it took me 20 or 30. I remember starting it when I was in my 20s. I'd get through the first volume or two, then throw it by the wayside — and because it's so dense, every time you start reading it, you have to go back to the beginning. So I don't know how many false starts I had with it before I actually stuck it out. Anyway, it sort of dominates your thinking when you're reading it; you're absorbed into that world. So while I was writing my novel, I was in Proust's world at the same time, and it did influence me, both thematically and stylistically in some ways. I've always been a fan of long, loopy sentences, and the chance to write sentences that sounded like sentences by Proust, or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, was attractive. And the book did turn out to be about a lot of the same things that "Remembrance of Things Past" is about.

Q: The novel that you probably have been expecting me to mention in relation to "Travelers Rest" is, of course, Stephen King's "The Shining." I think you're going to get that a lot.

A: Absolutely. In fact, I've never read "The Shining," although I'm a fan of the movie. I went through my Stephen King phase when I was in middle school, early high school, and read "The Stand," "The Dead Zone," and then later "Firestarter." But I did realize that there are these superficial — I think superficial — similarities that I was going to have to work against more than anything else. So I did have a sense of writing it and trying to keep "The Shining" at arm's length. I guess you could say it was the wall I was pushing off from. I think "Travelers Rest" is very different stylistically, and has very different characters, from "The Shining." But I knew in terms of the plot and the setting, people were going to point out the similarities.

Q: There are certain literary writers we might think of as children of Stephen King, in a way. Kelly Link, for example.

A: Yeah. She's a good friend of mine, actually.

Q: Karen Russell, too. These are people who have a way of combining the real and the unreal, or the real and the surreal. Do you think of that as a genre you have partaken of here?

A: You know, I think more and more writers — and I would include myself — are not really thinking in terms of genre anymore. I think the boundaries are down between what used to be considered genre fiction and traditional literary fiction, and that just gives me a whole new world to explore as a writer. When you have writers like Cormac McCarthy, who wrote post-apocalyptic fiction in "The Road," that just shows that the field is open now. You know, Kelly Link and I went to grad school together at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and we were doing this kind of fiction then. It was hard to get those stories published back then; you'd send them off to a literary magazine and they would think it was too genre-oriented. If you sent it to a sci-fi magazine, or a genre magazine, they would say it was too literary. But one of our teachers at UNC-G was doing the same thing —

A: Right. Fred is maybe best known as a poet, but he was applying principles of fantasy and magical realism to stories about farm kids in Appalachia and so forth. Kelly and I were both students of his, and he was really receptive to what we were doing. In fact, Fred tried to help me get some of those stories placed, without success. At that time in the '90s, the dominant mode was domestic realism. But four or five years later, they started getting published. Now it's open season. There's a lot of latitude now for writers and for readers all across the spectrum. We can all go anywhere we want.

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Poets & Writers Magazine and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1.